AppVeyor is a great continuous build/delivery service which is hosted in the cloud. You can think of it as a hosted alternative to TeamCity or Visual Studio Online. One of the best things is that it is free for open source projects. This makes it a popular choice for something like GenFu, our test data generation tool.

There are a couple of ways to set up AppVeyor for building a project like GenFu. You can put in place an AppVeyor.yml file which gives instructions about which steps to run to generate a build. Alternately you can put in place a powershell script to do the building. I opted for the latter because it is more portable to other build tools should it be necessary.

The first thing to do is to set up an AppVeyor account and hook it up to your source control. I signed in with github credentials so it was easy to locate the GenFu project which is, of course, hosted on github.

While configuration has been greatly simplified in ASP.NET Core, it won’t provide an answer for all the situations all of the time. One such case is when you need to save and load configuration settings from a database so, here, we’ll show you how.

With ASP.NET Core we have new options for the way we build out our controllers. Sure, the conventions we know are there, but today we have the option to use as much or as little of the base class as we like in MVC Core.

There is a lot of newness in the default project in MVC Core, so we wanted to break it down and help make it feel a little more familiar. This is episode #8, and we’re walking you through the “File -> New Project” experience.

Back in Episode 4 we looked at tag helpers in the Razor View Engine that make some of the lifting we need to do a little lighter when crafting our views. In this edition of the Monsters Weekly we’ll go a little further and create a custom tag helper.

People, this is 2016. If you’re waiting on your project to build or feel like your IDE is sluggish, it’s time to inventory and make sure you have the optimal configuraiton for development rig. Let’s talk quickly about the things that make your machine go fast (or slow) and some simple tweaks that can get your builds moving along more quickly.

Now that we’ve wrapped our heads around the basics of configuration in ASP.NET Core, let’s start to take control of our appliaction settings. In this episode, we’re looking at a pattern and leveraging the framework to get strongly-typed settings as objects at runtime.

Well, here we go! This is the inaugural installment of The Monsters Weekly, where we take you up, down through and over all the aspects of ASP.NET Core and Core MVC. In our first episode, we’re covering the startup.cs class and what happens as our application loads.

Not sure where to start in ASP.NET Core? Well, in startup.cs, of course. We run the file top-to-bottom covering some basic configuration, dependency injection, browser link, database error pages, service configuration and the Julie Lerman of Canada. This is an intro - we cover a lot of ground at 30,000 feet, but don’t worry, we’ll be breaking it down in the weeks ahead.

Your first impression of configuration in ASP.NET Core may be that a tyrant of a coyote with ACME corporate sponsorship laid into the system with a box of explosives. You wouldn’t be wrong, but here’s why it was the right thing to do.